Your Poet

It was a small auditorium, because poetry isn’t a hot commodity, because poetry isn’t a commodity. We sat in the first row. For the first time in my life I was going to listen to poetry read in someone else’s voice, while I melted into the language. There were three men and one woman, all students, who’d come from different colleges carrying their notebooks and white papers, to read their poetry to us. They all looked similar, except for one. Only one set his fragility on the table, proclaiming his human weakness, said, I’m afraid, I’m nervous, I’m wounded. I can’t hold it together, the music in my poetry is heard by the soul and not the ear. They came armed with the violins of language and its lofty strings, and he had the throat of a bird; he read as if his mouth frightened him. He was skinny, balding, and had shaved off the rest of his hair. He had a wide forehead, two pairs of glasses with black frames, golden skin, deep-set eyes, and thick eyebrows that arched beautifully as if they carried the weight of the world. His lips were thin and his mouth dry. He wore an olive shirt that was the color of the carpet in my room, and on his right eyebrow was a cut that looked like the crack in my wall. He looked like my life and my life looked like him; his poetry overflowed with orphanhood and exile, although he wasn’t really an orphan, nor completely exiled. When he read his poetry, I felt that he made the disaster concealed inside me speak. The unsettling electricity between us was something supernatural and extraordinary. I think I was the only one who listened to him that morning. He spoke to me as if he were my mouth.

Everyone had finished—he had been the last. The sparse audience clapped and everyone started gathering their things and getting ready to leave.

“Was it worth coming?” Hayat asked me.

“Definitely!”

She nudged my arm, feeling victorious.

“You should always do as I say.”

“It seems I will.”

“What did you think?”

“About what?”

“Everything.”

“The last one was the best.”

“You mean Isam?”

“I think that’s his name.”

“He’s mysterious. I didn’t understand his stuff.”

I smiled, as if happy to possess exclusive understanding of him.

I started to feel anxious. “Let’s go, before the driver arrives. If I’m late it’ll be the end of the world.”

“Don’t worry. . . . We’ll go back soon.”

We had started to leave when she commented, “Look at your poet. Poor guy, no one is talking to him!”

Each of the participants had a group hovering around them asking questions and congratulating them. Except him.

Hayat pulled my hand and said, “Come, let’s say hi.” Crazy Hayat, she does things like that with the naturalness of a mother who doesn’t want to discourage the poet whose “stuff” she “didn’t understand” and he. . . . Was he looking at me? I stood silent as a wall next to Hayat, who started to praise him at length and told him that she wished to read more of his work, lots of other things, lovely and untrue and fueled by good intentions. She ended by telling him simply, “My friend is a poet too!” He raised his eyebrows, and my heart skipped a beat. This time he looked right at me, right at my heart, which had been taken by surprise. I felt exposed and my heart pounded. “I—I’m not a poet,” I stammered. “I scribble.”

“I love scribbles.”

He said it and smiled. Then he wrote his email on the back of his poem, pressed the paper into my hand, and left. My body started to shake. “What’s wrong with you?” Hayat asked. I didn’t know how to respond. I was shaking like I had a fever.

“It’s cold.”

Hours later I was crouched in the depths of the basement, in the deepest pit of my soul. I inhaled the traces of the sweet perfume that had penetrated my life that afternoon. Happiness spread inside me. I said to myself, I want to draw out the experience, I want the poem to continue forever, stretching out between two mythological banks, like a rainbow. I will send him a message now, I will fight for myself and send him a message I’d written on a scrap of paper, folded and folded, then hid in a honey jar, hiding the jar under my bed. Poetry is a box inside a box, I pry open its secrecy and pull it gently from the hidden pouch, from inside the belly of a whale, from the heart of certainty. I turned the computer on, entered his email address, and in the great white space my fingers raced to type my four brief lines:

 

My heart is a black hole

Sucking everything in

I am the crushing mouth of nonexistence

I am the end of the world.